"Seismic stations nearby Shiveluch have registered that the giant volcano sent a plume of ash up to six kilometres into the sky today [October 22]," a spokesperson for the Kamchatka branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Geophysical Service told TASS on Thursday.

"However, video surveillance has failed due to a heavy snowstorm in the Ust-Kamchatka district," he said.

Along with this, Kamchatka’s department of the Russian Emergencies Ministry said that populated localities had not suffered from ash falls.

Earlier, TASS cited the Klyuchevskaya volcano observatory of the Far Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences as saying that Shiveluch had been demonstrating increased activity in recent days as fire avalanches were going from the lava dome down up to 0.5-1km along the volcano slopes towards the Baidarnaya and Bekesh rivers.

Shiveluch is the northernmost active volcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula. It is located 450 kilometres northeast of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. The absolute height of the volcano is 3,283 meters. The highest point of its active part, called Young Shiveluch, is 2,500 meters above sea level, the diameter of the crater is 1.5 kilometres. Catastrophic eruptions took place in 1864 and 1964, when a large part of the lava dome collapsed and created a devastating debris avalanche. Young Shiveluch has been active since September 1980. Specialists have been continuously monitoring the volcano for more than 30 years. So far the volcano poses no threat to neighbouring populated localities.